This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Radio networks make radio resource management (RRM) decisions based on radio link conditions, load, buffer size, and the like. Handover decisions are made based on radio link conditions, load, operator policies, and additional data. Scheduling decisions are made based on radio link conditions, buffer size and various other radio parameters.
However, radio networks do not take into account real time application feedback in RRM decision making, handover decisions, or scheduling decisions. Therefore, if a user using a particular application experiences degradation in performance, the radio network may not be able to return performance of the application to a suitable level or to increase performance of the application.
A technique called deep packet inspection (DPI) is being used to examine interne protocol (IP) packets in a network such as a wireless access network. This technique is called “deep” packet inspection because the data portion of an IP packet can be examined in addition to examination of multiple headers in the IP packet.
Radio networks support prepaid and post-paid billing based on volume, time, application usage, and other information. DPI techniques can be used to identify application type for billing purposes. However, there is no current technique for using DPI to evaluate application performance and using real time application performance to trigger billing optimization. Nonetheless, DPI may be used for other scenarios, as described below.
The third generation partnership project (3GPP) is defining offloading solutions that would enable offloading of Internet protocol (IP) flows based on following criteria:
1) Local IP access (LIPA);
2) Selective IP traffic offload (SIPTO); and
3) Traffic offload functions.
These offload solutions can either use APN (access point name) or DPI (deep packet inspection) or ACL (access control list) rules. However, existing solutions do not take into account real time application feedback in IP offload decision making.